The Covert Feminism of Silence of the Lambs
When I first saw this on a small television, on a bootleg VHS cassette, in a high school gym in Athens, Greece in the fall of 1991 I remember: one; being as lost in the dark as Agent Clarice Starling is in certain scenes, two; thinking that Jack Crawford was so unsettling that he must have something to hide, and three; having my child’s brain lulled to sleep by the tedium of the procedural scenes only for it to be galvanized like hot lead by the electricity of the violence — or the imminent possibility of it.
Quid pro quo, as the good doctor calls it, works as a wonderful metaphor for why an adolescent would stick it out with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. The film uses genre conventions to code its horrific violence and goes to great lengths to examine its pathology, but even Academy Award winners cannot sustain the tension without depicting a bit on the screen.
LAMBS is not a cinematic icon today if it doesn’t sully itself with grotesqueness from time to time.
Quid pro quo.
Playing Clarice Starling, an FBI cadet, Jodie Foster would win an Academy Award by creating in someone brave enough to chase the serial killer Buffalo Bill into the darkness, and yet someone so delicate and untested that you don’t want her to.
Foster’s performance that year was so good that she beat both Thelma and Louise for the Best Actress honors. THELMA AND LOUISE is remembered as a feminist road movie that track two best friends escape from patriarchal justice simply for enacting a modicum of it themselves. LAMBS wields its feminism more stealthily. Insidiously, some might argue.
Audiences didn’t seem to mind that the film wasted no effort on a male love interest to rescue Clarice as the film earned $272 million against a $19 million dollar budget and launched a cottage industry of police procedural television shows and a slew of big-screen imitators.
LAMBS created a template for female characters forced to be note-perfect without the benefit of a safety net.
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) became a Final Girl by happenstance. It was Doctor Loomis (Donald Pleasence) whose profession tasked him with tracking down Michael Myers.
Jodie Foster has to play both.
Clarice exhausts herself navigating the system and sleuths out the killer essentially alone, relying on intuition, training, and guile.
Watching it now, Scott Glenn’s performance as FBI Head of Behavioral Sciences reads like a modern take down of gender politics. Though still unnerving, Crawford’s Male Gaze is never deliberately leveled at Starling. Standing in the back of the auditorium of her graduation Crawford seems content to watch her.
He is part puppeteer, part voyeur.
Jack Crawford isn’t coded as murderous at all. He is domineering but somehow aloof. Autocratic and joyless, Crawford is not unmoved by the horrific so much as he bound up by it.
His placid, or sterile behavior, which I misinterpreted back then as villainous, is actually coded as patriarchal, hierarchical, and stagnant. Clinical. Dead. In the absence of a personality, the audience projects onto Crawford whatever anxiety suits them. The exploitation of women in the workplace? Governmental duplicity? Or simple and unfortunately timeless misogyny?
In the opening credit sequence, Starling is called from the training course to meet with Crawford. In the elevator we see Jodie Foster’s size and femininity contrasted to the bulky males who populate the FBI academy.
Before the autopsy scene, a row of policemen mill around observing Starling as out-of-place, and during the autopsy, Crawford continues to observe her. Demme inverts the Male Gaze within the text as a means of alienation. The POV framing asks the audience to feel the discomfort in being stared at.
Later when interviewing Dr. Lecter, Starling (and the audience) look into his transparent cell but cannot gain sight of him because of the lack of light in his cell and the Plexiglas that divides them which reflects the light from her side of the room. Even in a cage, Demme establishes that Lector is the one observing her — trying to observe him.
Is Crawford a physical threat to Clarice? No. Probably not. His willingness to expose her to traumas unimaginable is not altruism either. I struggled to categorize Crawford in 1991 because director Jonathan Demme has no regards for depicting him as a mentor. She is the worm on the end of a hook; something her character bristles at upon discovery.
The audience may not even realize it, but they are no more comfortable in his presence than they are in the scenes Clarice shares with Doctor Hannibal Lector (Anthony Hopkins). Every man in the film is using Clarice — or at the least wishes to — towards their own objectives.
You could argue that Lector is the only male character to reconcile the paradox (beautiful & intelligent, untried yet proficient, fragile but shoots to kill) that she presents and see her as a person, as opposed to a tool. Demme does just an amazing job of making the audience afraid of Lector that it is easy to miss the fact that he does as much, if not more, mentoring of Clarice as Crawford does.
The film so deftly establishes the rules of Hanibal Lector’s visitation that you become unconsciously afraid anytime that Hopkins is on the screen, which isn’t much. Hopkins has only 16 minutes of screen time in LAMBS; in which time he creates an iconic character that endures thirty years later and won him an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Though the performance might seem hammy in 2023, audiences in 1991 had one advantage over us. They weren’t bombarded with thirty years of Hanibal Lector parodies ranging from Family Guy to THE CABLE GUY (1996).
We forget, but in 1991, Hanibal Lector had teeth.
Demme’s picture rarely tilts its axis towards exploitation, though in another filmmaker’s hands you can easily imagine it. Actually you don’t even have to because Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon was adapted twice; the first time by Michael Mann, and the second time by Brett Ratner.
One film is interested in pathos, obsession, self-martyrdom, and the deconstruction of ego. The other film is directed by Brett Ratner.
Watching LAMBS now I couldn’t care less about the violence which — whilst shocking in 1991 — seems quaint by modern standards. The film endures on tenable qualities like: subtext, symbolism, cinematography, and the motives that animate these terrific performances.
Over the years — as I’ve purchased superior versions on the latest platforms — I’ve noticed new details in every new viewing. The 4K transfer doesn’t add much clarity to the serial killer’s underground lair but it does marvels for Jodie Foster’s blue eyes, and the tears that she fights back, until she can’t, and for the quiet gratitude in Hopkins expression in reciprocation, allowing Clarice her dignity back.
Quid pro quo.
Part of me misses that sheltered kid watching SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (under a blanket in a school gymnasium in 1991) for his capacity to be scandalized, but not for very long.
The adult sees that those bureaucratic gears that embolden the clear-eyed, young student are just as likely to get her killed. You don’t have to cross a cannibalistic physician to wind up as grist for the mill.
